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Chill Out, 1 Percenters

Remember when New York City subway cars looked like this?Credit
Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

IT’S not full-blown panic yet, but a discernible angst is descending over New York City’s affluent residents, who are worried about the coming mayoralty of Bill de Blasio.

At cocktail parties, one hears familiar litanies about higher taxes on the wealthy to fund prekindergarten education, and potentially falling real estate prices. A hedge fund friend tells me that the mayor-elect’s determination to denude Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk strategy makes him shudder. A columnist for The Daily Beast asks if Mr. de Blasio is “the new Dinkins” while the usually reasonable Economist warns that “by choosing Bill de Blasio, New Yorkers have taken a risk with their city’s prosperity.”

As someone who has spent his adult life raising a family and running a financial business in New York, I have some words of wisdom for my anxious friends: Calm down.

Bill de Blasio is no Daniel Ortega (though he’s gotten grief for having gone to Nicaragua in 1988 to give out food during the civil war there). Amending the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy to be less race-based makes sense and will not create anarchy on the streets. In fact, the city has already quietly reduced the number of stops by over half, and the sky has not fallen. And a modest tax increase in order to pay for pre-K education, probably not doable in any case because it requires state approval, is not the first step in turning New York City into an urban kibbutz.

Over the past quarter-century, like other New Yorkers, I’ve enjoyed the pleasures of a safer, cleaner and more prosperous city. I’ve been able to hire lots of smart people, and build a successful business; my two children were raised free from worry about their personal safety. I’ve also witnessed waves of immigrants breathe new life into derelict neighborhoods, and seen the South Bronx literally rise from the ashes. It is a daily thrill to live in New York City. And I, too, remember what the city was like in the 1970s and 1980s. The graffiti. The crime. The crack vials in the park. The lawlessness. I harbor no nostalgia for that period.

But while I understand that making the city a millionaires’ playground has its benefits — and not just for millionaires — I also find this affluent angst more than a bit overwrought.

There is no denying that living in Mr. Bloomberg’s New York has given the comfortable a deep sense of security over the past 12 years. City Hall has been led by “one of us,” someone who knows what it’s like to run a business, has a vacation home, and pays for private schools; someone who lived in the same privileged bubble we did. It’s true everyone benefits from a safer New York, but the city is particularly wonderful for those who can actually afford its housing, attend concerts in Lincoln Center, eat in its fancy restaurants and pay for parking to boot. To this fortunate group, government exists in large measure to keep the merry-go-round going, to maintain public order.

Concern about Mr. de Blasio’s intention or ability to spoil the party is misplaced for several reasons. It exaggerates his radicalism — thanks in part to his own rhetoric — and underestimates the strength of the city’s economic foundation. And it fails to take into account the consensus that has emerged over the past quarter-century about how New York City should be governed.

The conventional wisdom about New York City’s recovery goes something like this: Edward I. Koch (1978-1989) restored the city’s fiscal footing and boosted its morale, but did little to stem the chaos of his era. David N. Dinkins (1990-1993), according to this narrative, was a weak leader who stood helpless while gangs roamed the streets freely and sent the city to the precipice, at which point Rudolph W. Giuliani (1994-2001) saved the day with a combination of tough talk and innovative policing policies, while Mr. Bloomberg (2002-2013) and his brilliant police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, built and improved on that record.

There is a grain of truth to this narrative, but it ignores the degree to which Mr. Koch planted the seeds of the city’s recovery, dismisses meaningful contributions by Mr. Dinkins, and overstates Mr. Giuliani’s impact. In fact, Mr. Bloomberg and his three predecessors have been remarkably consistent about how they dealt with the city’s two bedrock issues, economic development and crime-fighting, and there is every indication that Mr. de Blasio fits neatly into the consensus.

Since the 1970s fiscal crisis, Mayors Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg have all shared a fundamental belief that if the city can continue to be a magnet for business, the municipal coffers will overflow with funds to pay for the arts, education, social programs and infrastructure. And cops. This is not just trickle-down economics; this is the underpinning of the city’s turnaround since its brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s: keep business here, keep tax dollars flowing, and then and only then, spend money on social projects.

THIS philosophy was not loudly articulated, except, perhaps, by Michael Bloomberg, but it was unwaveringly followed. Ed Koch, who rarely voiced empathy for the poor, capped his 12 years in office with the ultimate government program, a $5.1 billion housing program that rebuilt entire neighborhoods, and is often cited as a major factor in the city’s drop in crime years later. In the early 1990s, when the financial industry was actually fleeing the city, David Dinkins aggressively courted companies, and granted large tax abatements to companies such as Morgan Stanley and Prudential Securities to keep them from leaving. It was on his watch that the city’s crime rate began to fall, and it was he who beefed up the New York Police Department and first hired Ray Kelly as police commissioner. But who remembers Mr. Dinkins as a pro-business, law-and-order mayor?

None of this necessarily means that Bill de Blasio similarly understands the formula that has kept New York economically balanced. But his close relationship with the real estate industry, including his support for the controversial Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, his overtures to Mr. Giuliani’s former police commissioner, William J. Bratton, and his choice of the city government veteran Carl Weisbrod to co-lead his transition all point to the fact that he falls well within the mainstream of New York City politics.

As a candidate, the once low-key Mr. de Blasio, currently the city’s public advocate, hammered away at the idea that New York under Mayor Bloomberg had become “a tale of two cities,” while offering little evidence of how the mayor’s policies had made this so. He still seems unable to speak four sentences without referring to himself as a progressive. But he doesn’t say much about how a progressive picks up the garbage, helps raise reading and math scores or negotiates union contracts. Once he prevailed in the Democratic primary, in September, many supporters hoped in vain that he would move to the center. Having defined himself as a man of the left, he has become trapped in some ways by his own rhetoric.

In reality, it is not the affluent who are apt to be disappointed by a de Blasio administration, but those who voted for him with the expectation that the mayor could meaningfully change their lives. Few mayors have entered City Hall as hamstrung as Mr. de Blasio will. He faces a budget deficit of up to $2 billion next year, and tough labor negotiations with the city’s municipal unions. His ability to raise taxes to pay for his various programs is constricted by Albany, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has given no indication that he supports raising taxes.

But, if amid this governing straitjacket Mr. de Blasio can give all New Yorkers a sense that their voices are being heard in City Hall, that will be something everyone — including the 1 percent — should like.

Neil Barsky is a former hedge fund manager who directed the documentary “Koch” and is developing The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism enterprise that will cover the criminal justice system.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 17, 2013, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Chill Out, 1 Percenters. Today's Paper|Subscribe